Strategic alliances and open innovation are topics of growing interest. Innovation has always been a top concern for high performing organizations. Innovation is often considered as the royal path to growth. Open innovation is the wave of the future for all organizations, large and small, public and private enterprises.

What is open innovation and how does it link to strategic alliance development?

Strategic alliances and tactical partnerships are both good frameworks for collaboration. But what do we mean by the terms ‘strategic alliances’ and ‘tactical partnerships’? How are they similar and how are they different?

Semantics aside, usage really depends on the specific markets, what part of the world you are in and which organizations are doing the defining.

‘Strategic alliances’ is an often overused term to describe any and all forms of partnerships. A strategy at its origin is a military term from the Greek language meaning generalship. Today the common understanding of the term ‘strategy’ is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty, over a period of time. [Read more…]

Strategic alliances and open systems can teach us much concerning the new ways of working. As a strategic alliance professional and a business consultant, opening up closed systems for clients and assisting organizations to embrace ecosystem development is a core competency.

Strategic alliances is a profession onto itself. Where the profession lies within corporate or not for profit organizations is an interesting question which was bantered about recently at the global summit of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP).

The strategic alliance profession is growing and ASAP is the leading association in the field. Their role is to promote the profession and the discipline of alliances, partnerships and channel development. The profession is relatively recent in the business world and the emergence of executives with titles such as Chief Alliance Officer, Alliance Director or Partner Manager are cropping up more frequently in resumes and professional profiles. [Read more…]

Member firm organizations are one form of strategic alliances which are becoming more prominent in the business world. Member firms are loosely or tightly knit groups of companies which have chosen to come together to promote their common interests and to help each other to grow revenues and capabilities.

If one googles the term ‘member firms’ and toggles a bit, you can find interesting examples and applications of how individual companies are tied together in member firm organizations. Some member firm organizations are going to market under a single, lead brand whereas others are connected under an endorsed brand. Some are publicly touted as a single entity (like a corporation or a franchise) and others are happily united as members of a group of independents (like a business club or professional association). [Read more…]

Ecosystems are an exciting extension of the traditional practice of strategic alliances.

At a recent global summit meeting organized by the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP), we shared and exchanged the most recent thinking concerning creative partnering solutions. Strategic alliances, situated on the continuum between organic growth and post-merger integration, have become increasing prevalent over the past two decades. [Read more…]

The short answer is: yes, they are. Strategic alliances take many forms in politics, business agreements and in social relations. One of these forms of strategic alliances which we all recognize from history are treaties between nations. [Read more…]

Strategic alliances involve putting together partnerships which are designed to create more value for each organization than each one could generate on its own. They are strategic because the relationships are more than transactional commercial agreements. They are alliances because they imply long term frameworks, over multiple years, with complex and codified rules of cooperation.

New ways of working concern all the organizational and behavioral aspects of the way we produce goods & services, mostly driven by technology innovations and ubiquitous information. Our relationship to space and time is being modified. We are physical and virtual at the same time. We are always on, 24/7. We share effortlessly our work products without paper or the need to be sitting next to each other. [Read more…]

Accountable Care Organizations (better known by their acronym ACO) are among the latest & greatest attempts to gain control of spiraling, out-of-control health care costs. The Affordable Heath Care Act (better known as “Obama Care”) is convoluted and needs some serious tweaking. But the overall political purpose of the legislation is to provide affordable health care to the general population (expanded coverage) and at a lower cost: more productivity, quality, efficiency and streamlined patient-care processes.

The good news is that the ACO framework for Medicare and Medicaid is the most sensible and potentially the most effective way to achieve the very ambitious double goal of the Act:

Coopetition – please excuse the neologism – is a term created to describe a situation where two or more organizations which would normally be in competition would cooperate with each other in some form or manner.

Coopetition is a key concept for strategic alliance professionals because there are rarely cases where all parties involved in a collaborative process experience an immediate ‘win-win’ situation. Usually, one or more of the parties feels that his ‘best case’ scenario was not fully realized. [Read more…]